I continue my quest to find out what people around me would like to see from bloggers’ coverage of the Libby trial. Some people are solely focused on gaining that one nugget of information that will tie the whole story together. I will leave that to the more experienced professional journalists or a gadfly with laser like focus. Instead, right now, I’m looking more at character development.

One of the first things I wanted to think more about is what is it like inside a Federal courtroom? What is it like to be on the stand? What are the stories of the people involved? My father-in-law and mother-in-law are both retired U.S. Treasury Agents. They have spent a fair amount of time testifying at Federal trials. The stories they tell at family picnics about their work are much different than the stories you see in TV dramas.

It may well be that explosions and narrowly avoiding a criminal’s gunshot is better material for TV shows than it is for family picnics, but most of the talk I’ve heard has been about painstaking attention to detail, triple checking to make sure that each I is dotted and each T is crossed. These stories came to mind as Rory O’Connor wrote about Agent Bond.

Bond looks “severe,” as Amy Goldstein of the WaPo sitting next to me offers. Not surprising, I suppose, for a female FBI agent.

Bond has been with the Bureau for nineteen years. She has been involved in this case since October 2003. She took charge of it about a year ago.

I read this, and thought of my mother-in-law, who became a U.S. Agent when she was nineteen. My kids have nicknamed her ‘Sarge’, due to her no nonsense approach to keeping people on task. People who don’t know her might say she looks severe as well, but then again, they’ve probably never seen her holding a grandchild, or dancing up a storm on Dance Dance Revolution with older grandchildren.

She and her husband offered me interesting insights. Look at people’s faces, they told me. Pay attention to the expressions of the jurors. I read a bit about the juror selection process. It was difficult to find jurors in Washington D.C. that didn’t have strong political opinions or a lot of knowledge about the case.

In Libby Jury Is Chosen; Arguments Set to Start, Amy Goldstein wrote about the composition of the jury.

The nine women and three men selected for the jury -- as well as four alternates …
In a city where most residents are black, 90 percent are Democrats and the local culture is steeped in politics, the jury is not completely representative. Ten of the 12 jurors -- and two of the alternates -- are white.

It will be interesting to watch the jurors to get more of a sense of that part of the story. Kevin Bohn of CNN’s Washington bureau writes a little bit about Juror’s asking questions and David Shuster of MSNBC observes during Ari Fleischer’s testimony, that it is “the first time in the trial we’ve noticed every juror/alternate appearing to write down everything the witness is saying.”

After speaking with my in-laws, I ended up at a birthday party where I spoke with a young man who is a program director for a YMCA in a community straddling affluent neighborhoods and some fairly poor neighborhoods. We talked about my longing to help the voiceless find their voices. The discussions moved to people not in the headlines. We read plenty about the crack addict arrested in a recent raid, but how often do we hear about his children as they struggle their way through middle school? How do we reach out to and help these people? Who are the people being missed during the Libby Trial?

David Isenberg provided an important insight in his comment to a previous post.

I noticed that several homeless people had commandeered benches and draped them in layers of cardboard and sleeping bags against the winter wind, sharing the courtroom's plaza with the camera crews.

The U.S. is spending a lot of money on the war in Iraq. Soldiers are coming home physically and emotionally scarred. Too often, returning soldiers with hidden emotional scars end up living on the street. This too is part of the story, and I wonder if the journalists and jurors see the homeless as they enter the courtroom.

There are also the emotional scars that intelligence agents carry. While I rarely hear about exciting car chases or gunfights in my father-in-law’s career, I know that he had his share of stress. As a child, his daughter, who would later become my wife, was for the most part blissfully unaware of the dangers her father faced. I wonder about the children of CIA agents who were jeopardized by the revelations about Joseph Wilson’s wife’s job. These are probably stories we won’t get to hear.

I am scheduled to cover week six of the trial. The trial is expected to last four to six weeks, so I may not actually make it into the courtroom. Yet I will keep sifting through what I can to find a broader narrative.